I

TUNISIAN DAYS

I

I WAS fortunate in my first landfall at Tunis. It was a fine sea picture framed in that chill November dawn. On my left, over the rippling watery gold to the few pink clouds eastward, lay the great blue mountain headland, stretching far behind. In front, a little to the right, was Goletta, the port, hard by; and ranging off northward the line of the ocean beach ran stern and solemn, with the lighthouse above. That rise, there, was the hill of Carthage. Westward over the hollow space of waters swept the crescent horizon inland, low and misty, centred a little to the south by the obscure white of far Tunis. Carthage is the first thought of the traveller; his instant memory is of Phoenician ships, and his imagination is of Scipio and Regulus—these are the sights they saw.

The steamer plied up the long canal that makes the shallow, broad lake navigable to the docks some miles beyond; flamingoes flew to the right and left over the level lapping waters, fresh in the raw, damp, almost rainy air; and gradually Tunis drew in sight, like a great white flower on the bosom of the sloping uplands, strange, solitary, unexpected, with minarets and the island look of a Moslem city.

II

Barren enough was my first acquaintance with the land side, weary, cheerless, desolate, like windy prairies in autumn, uninhabited, uninhabitable; and I was chilled to the bone when I came back to the hotel, then in the bud of its first season. It is more sober now, but then it had a near cousinship to Monte Carlo; it was delightfully irresponsible, vivacious, gay. One passed to the picturesque bar and the café, thick with interesting groups; or with equal ease to the “little horses” with their ever-dissolving banks of faces, a covey of all nations, round the bell-timed play, and to the vaudeville stage with gymnasts, French acting, fat Jewess dancers, and a world lightly enjoying itself, as it looked from railed low boxes on the spacious floor—men, women, children, with tables, glasses, straws, and bright-colored things to drink, waiters, musicians—always a pretty scene, with incidents, and rich in human relations; or one went more gravely by a stairway to the privacy of baccarat in its upper seclusion of the visiting card. It was a pleasant and polite place wherever one might stroll about, and in every corridor and at all hours the grand toilette of capitals, men and women—even adventurers—of the world. The old beylic of Tunis seemed far away; at least, one was still in Christendom.

I stepped out on the sidewalk after dinner, on a broad avenue with trees. At the brilliant crossing carriages were passing with drawn screens; and, as they drove slowly by, fingers held back the curtains, and from time to time glimpses of women’s figures were disclosed of quite a different type from any within doors—ladies of wealthy native families taking the air, and curious to see the French streets by night. So I learned that it was the eve of Leilet-el-Kadir, the twenty-sixth of Ramadan, the night of power commemorating the descent of the Koran on earth, a grand Mohammedan feast; and I went forthwith into old Tunis on my first voyage of discovery. Festivity reigned. On every hand were lights of all varieties; the minarets aloft were outlined with them; in the narrow streets they were as the multitude of the stars for number, colored and clustered, hung and looped and festooned, flaring and lanterned, a fine illumination in the obscurity; and under them an animated throng of all ages, beautifully dressed for the occasion—a city, a race, and a faith en fête.

I sat down at last in the café-crowded Place Halfouine, one of the principal open spaces or squares of the old city, not large, and surrounded by low, rather mean, buildings. It was a nightscene, closed in by shadows, the foreground brightened by irregularly placed open cafés with tables outside and benches within, all completely filled with men, drinking, smoking, playing at simple games, quite orderly, without boisterous noise or muscular disorder, or joking—admirable public behavior. It charmed by its novelty—costumes and persons, mass without individuality—the scene of a new land. What folly to think that there are no more worlds to discover! The scene was to me as if no one had ever looked on it before. I observed the faces, the attitudes, the doings of this strange people as if I had just landed from another world; and I would gladly have stayed longer, but, with the early closing habits of Moslems, the square began to thin, and I went with the rest through the fast-emptying street with a glad feeling that in a world, now grown altogether too small and neighborly, I had happened upon one last true relic of the “far away.”

It was four days later, however, that the true holiday came, the feast of rejoicing after Ramadan is over—Little Bairam. It is celebrated at Tunis with special zeal. The morning streets were overflowing with men and children in their best apparel; but the latter, in particular, beautifully attired. Such gold jackets, such tiny burnooses, such scarlet and crimson, turquoise and emerald—and pinks! Such chubby fat faces in their barbaric borders of clothes—or delicate, refined features, stamped with race, set off by their greens and blues! Such vivacity, too; pure childish fun and pleasure in a national holiday! There were strings of open carts of the rudest construction—like tip-carts for gravel—completely filled with these children heaped up like nosegays, their brilliancy of color set off by the rudeness of the common cart. This seemed one of their principal pleasures—taking a ride. But there were others. In a packed cross-street I was addressed by two gallant lads of perhaps fifteen, who were selling tickets at an entrance; with faces and figures full of hospitable welcome to the stranger, they invited me in, and I went. Inside was a small, barn-like theatre with a curtain, a stage and an audience; and there I saw “the shadows,” pictures thrown upon a screen, and the histrionic art was thus practised with lifelike effect. I had read of “the shadows,” but I never expected to see them. I came out after a while, and the boys saluted me with very cheerful and animated smiles as I passed them. I spied another show a little farther on; and this, undaunted by my former experience, I also entered. It was the puppets—also a traveller’s treasure-trove—the French gendarme was the universal and unpitied victim, and the plots were realistic incidents from things as they are. The audience was almost wholly of children, from six years or less to twelve or more, many of them with nurses or attendants; they took an active and even excited interest, and did the necessary reckonings and sums which the transactions on the stage called for, and shouted out the answers as at a school exhibition, it might be, though the transactions in question were not of a sort ever shown at an American school, and would have evoked much remonstrance; but the children were very happy through it all, thoroughly enjoyed it, in fact. I went behind the curtain and saw the puppets engineered; and I left the little theatregoers with fresh ideas of juvenile amusements.

So all the morning I passed among the gayly decked crowd, with one and another small adventure, always handsomely treated, aided, saluted. A people of kind and gentle manners, old and young; and I am glad that I first saw them so fortunately in their days of pleasantry and taking pride in their own. The experience threw an atmosphere of cheerfulness over the land and the people, and softened many a darker scene of their common days, of their penury and hardship—their load of life. I could always think, even when all was at its worst, that they still “had seasons that only bade live and rejoice,” when many went bravely clad and fed full, and the whole city was vivid with a spirit of general joy. The fixed expression of the crowd was one of resigned patience under habitual control; the gayety, the happiness, the holiday were relieved on a grave background—a temperament, a character, an essential living, unknown to me, something secret, profound. It was my first true contact with Islam. One way, at least, by which a religion may properly be measured is by its efficient power on those who profess it; certainly the Moslem faith is very effective on its believers; the sincerity of that faith is the first thing one learns about it in practical observation. How often since then have I gathered with them at this and other fêtes, and seen the carpeted streets and tapestried walls, the solemn processions, the robes of state, the fine horses, the men and the arms, all the barbaric display; illuminations, fireworks, parades; but I have never been so struck, as in these first Tunisian days, with the spirit of gentle happiness that made my earliest impression of the race as I met it on the shore of the sea.

III

Ranging through the country by rail, I found one of the oldest lands of earth wearing the signs, familiar to my eyes years ago, of the American West. It seemed, at times, like an hallucination of memory with odd differences, such as one might have in a dream. Now and then one came to a larger and well-gardened station, some watering-place of the richer citizens in summer; or to a thriving seaport; but, in general, the stops were at way stations, as in all thinly populated districts—a simple crossing of the long gray roads, with a few buildings for the business of the line, vast spaces round about, possibly slightly improved, with fields or orchards or little groves, a crowd of loafers hanging on the gates or fence of the enclosure to whom the arrival of the train was the day’s event, a farm wagon of modern make, with horses, awaiting some expected passenger and driving off to some home lost in the expanse; in a word, the impression was of colonial things, of the opening up of a country, of reclaiming the soil. What one really saw everywhere was a frontier.

In the newspapers there was the same absorbing theme—colonization; the local news, the daily happenings were characteristic of an agricultural, industrial, commercial life of the nature of an invasion of the waste. Here large depots for machinery were rising; there men of broad enterprise, or syndicate companies had planted olives, or corn, or vines, on a vast scale over miles of territory; further on, a new line was making accessible the phosphate wealth of Gafsa. Modern civilization, mechanism, communication, organized exploitation, penetrating a new country, was what one felt, as if that region were truly new like a savage land. Yet how many times civilization, in one or another form, has rolled over it! In reality, it is one of the most ancient beds of the human torrent, bare and forsaken as it looks now. And now it is again a new frontier—the place of the invasion of a new era by a new race with new designs.

This impression, nevertheless, is mainly a thing of the mind, of recollection and observation; to the eye it is not so noticeable, such is the extent of the natural spaces, the contour and atmosphere of things held in these far horizons, the new temperament of that landscape, and so characteristically native still is the aspect of indigenous human life not yet displaced. The earth has the look of the wild. Whatever may have formerly been its culture and occupancy, all had lapsed back to the primitive; a land of plains—melancholy tracts under a gray sky or vast empty spaces under a brilliant sun—edged in far distance by lone mountains, caressed on broken shores by a barren sea; full of solitude, sadness. Here and there some great ruin stood, not unlike Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, or even cities of ruins; the land is strewn with them—temples, courts, baths, cisterns, floors, columns, reliefs, arches of triumph, theatres; but they seldom count to the eye. Antiquity, like the frontier, is also a thing of the mind, in the main; the past and the future are both matter of reflection, in the background of memory and knowledge it may be, but not noticeable in the general landscape. It is a place where human fate seems transitory, an insignificant detail, as on the sea—or like animal life in nature, indifferent.

IV

Once on such an excursion on the eastern seacoast, the Tunisian Sahel, I left Sousse behind in the noon glare, a busy, thriving, pleasant place, swarming with Arab life in its well-worn ancestral ways and with French enterprise in its pioneering glow. The old Saracen wall lay behind me towered and gated, a true mediæval girdle of defence, and I gazed back on the white city impearling its high hillside in the right Moslem way, and then settled myself to the long ride southward as I passed through cemeteries, crisscrossed with Barbary fig, and by gardens adjoining the sea, and struck out into the plain, spotted with salty tracts and little cultivated. It is thus that a ride on this soil is apt to begin—with a cemetery; it is often the master note that gives the mood to a subsequent landscape, a mood of sadness that is felt to be sterile also, impregnated with fatalism. A Moslem burying-ground may be, at rare places, a garden of repose; a forsaken garden it is usually, even when most dignified and beautiful with its turbaned pillars in the thick cypresses; but it is always a complete expression of death. The cemetery lies outside at the most used entrance of a town; and, as a rule, in the country it is of a melancholy indescribable—it lies there in so naked a fashion, a hopeless and huddled stretch of withered earth in swells and hummocks, hardly distinguishable from common dirt and débris—the eternal potter’s field. It is a fixed feature in the Tunisian landscape, which is made of simple elements, whose continuous repetition gives its monotony to the land. A ride only rearranges these elements under new lights and in new horizons.

Here the great plain was the common background; my course to Sfax lay over it, broken at first by a blossoming of gardens round a town or village, and twice I came out on the sea; but always the course was over a plain with elemental mark and quality—with an omnipresence as of the sea on a voyage. The line between man’s domain and nature is as sharply drawn on this plain as on a beach; where man has not labored the scene stretches out with nature in full possession, as on the ocean; his habitations and territory are islands. Everything is seen relieved on great spaces, individualized, isolated; fields of grain, green and moving under a strong land wind; or olive groves—silvery gleams—on the hillsides, clumps of trees, or long lines of them, whole hillsides, it may be; or there are gardens, closed, secluded, thickly planted with pear or peach or fig or other fruit, with vegetables, perhaps, beneath and palms above. The figure scenes, too, are of the same recurring simplicity—a man leading a spirited horse in the street, a camel meagre and solemn and solitary silhouetting the sky anywhere within a range of miles, boys in couples herding sheep in the middle distances. The town or village emerging at long intervals is a monochord—a point of dazzling white far off, dissolving on approach into low houses, a confused mass of uneven roofs skirting the ground except where the minaret and the palm rise and unite it to heaven—to the fire-veined evening sky, deep and tranquil, or the intense blue noon, or the pink morning bloom of the spiritualized scene of the dawn. The streets are silent; by the Moorish café lie or sit or crouch motionless figures, sometimes utterly dull, like logs on the earth, or else holding pipes or gazing at checkers, or vacant—always somnolent, statuesque, sedentary. There are no windows, no neighborhood atmosphere—only a stagnant exterior. The feeling of a retreat, of repose, of being far away is always there. These towns have a curious mixture of the eternal and the ruined in their first aspect; as of things left by the tide, derelicts of life all. A ride in the Sahel is a slow, kaleidoscopic combination of these things, a reiteration without new meaning—the town, the cemetery, the grove, the garden, the plain, the fields, camels and sheep, and herdboys—horizons, somnolence, tranquillity. What a ride! and then to come out on the sea at Monastir and Mahdia—such a homeless sea! There may be boats with bending sails, the fisher’s life, suggesting those strange outlying islands they touch at, exile islands from long ago, where Marius found hiding, and where the Roman women of pleasure of the grand world were sent to live and die, out of the world—still the home of a race, blending every strain of ancient blood. Mahdia, once an Arab capital and long a seat of power in different ages, is a famous battle name in Mohammedan and crusading and corsair annals; it stood many a great siege on its rocky peninsula, in Norman and other soldiering hands, however lifeless it may seem now; but as one looks on its diminutive harbor, a basin hewn in the rock, it seems now to speak rather of the enmity of the sea and the terror of tempest on this dangerous coast—shallow waters and inhospitable shores. History, human courage, was but a wave that broke over it, and is gone like the others, a momentary foam; but the sea is always the sea. Everywhere one must grow familiar with the neighboring coast-line before the sea will lay off that look of enmity it wears to all at the first gaze; it is foreign always by nature. To descend here at Mahdia, and to walk by its waves, to hear its roll, to look off to its gulfs and hilltops afar, however brilliant may be the scene, is to invite the deepest melancholy that the waste sea holds—so meaningless that world lies in its monotony all about. I remembered the Moorish prince who here, after his long victories, stood reflecting on the men who were great before him, and how their glory was gone. It is a more desolate port now. One gladly turns to the land—and there meets the plain, equally vaguely hostile.

So I rode on by the unceasing stretch of the way, through town and by garden and grove, into the ever-enveloping plain that opened before. It was like putting to sea at every fresh start; and late in the afternoon, on the last far crest of the rolling plain, I saw the great ruin, El Djem, that rose with immense commanding power and seemed to dominate a world of its own sterile territory. It is a great ruin—a colosseum; arches still in heaven, and piled and fallen rocks of the old colossal cirque; it still keeps its massive and uplifted majesty, its Roman character of the eternal city cast down in the waste, its monumental splendor—a hoar and solemn token of the time when there were inhabitants in this desolation to fill the vast theatre on days of festival, and the line of its subject highway stretched unbroken to Tunis and southward, a proud, unending urban way of villas, a road of gardens, where now only stagnates the salty plain, sterile, lifeless. The hamlet beside it is hardly perceptible, like a mole-hill, a mere trace of human life. I sat out the sunset; and after, under a cold, starry sky, Orion resplendent in the west and the evening star a glory, I set off again by the long road through the sparkling April darkness and a wind that grew winter-cold with night, southward still—the vast heavens broken forth with innumerable starry lights—till after some hours of speeding on a route that was without a living soul, I came again on belated groups of walking Bedouins and fragrant miles of gardens dark by the roadway and many a thick olive grove, and drew up at Sfax.

V

Sfax is the southern capital of Tunisia. It has always been an important site, and under the new rule of the French thrives and prospers commercially, in true frontier fashion, as the chief market and base of the country being opened up in the inland behind it whose seaport it is. It is also an old Mohammedan stronghold, and its inherited life and customs go on, as at Sousse, in the immemorial Arab ways. I remember it as the city of the olive and the sponge. In the early morning light the open spaces about the market were littered with young boys at their open-air breakfast, which may be seen at most Mediterranean seaports on the Moslem side—the vender beside his cooking apparatus, the boys with saucers of soup or sops of bread, and on all sides the beginnings of labor; but all this meagre human life was framed in an exquisite marine view beyond. The wharf was thickly lined with the strange-looking boats of the sponge-fishers, their Greek flags at half-mast in honor of Good Friday, their sailors in Albanian costumes, their gear heaping the open spaces with ropes and nets and endless tackle. It was all charming, one of the vignettes of travel that will haunt the memory for years—the odors, the little tasks, the look of the toil of the sea, the sponges in dark heaps, the blue, limpid morning air crossed with strange spars and ropes, and the host of fluttering flags.

Later in the day I got its companion scene from a hilltop some miles south of the city, whence one commands a view of olive orchards sloping down in one vast grove, in lines of regular intervals, as far as the eye can reach, and lost to sight on all sides with nothing to break the expanse—only millions of olive-trees regularly planted, filling the entire broad, circling landscape. A little tower surmounts the hilltop and from its round apex one surveys the whole; the sense of this dot-like centre enhances the impression that the scene makes of a living weft of mathematical lines, like an endless spider’s web. It is a unique sight. The geometrical effect is curious, like an immense garden-diagram; the similarity of the round, bullet-like heads of the trees, all alike in shape, is a novel trait of monotony; the silver-gray of the foliage, mixed with the reddish tones of the soil, gives, in so broad a view, a ground earth color quite new to the eye; and the sense of multitude in which, nevertheless, individuality remains persistent and acutely distinct on so vast a scale makes an indelible impression.

VI

I seek in vain the secret of the charm that Tunis lays upon me. Coming back to it, one feels something intimate in the city, such as there is in places long lived in and cherished, impregnated with memories, subtilized by forgotten life and feeling. It has sunk deeper into the senses, the affections. Can the charm be merely its soothing air, its weather, which, after all, is our physical element? It has a marvellous sky; all hues that are celestial and live in heaven are there. What clarity! Its changeable blues excite and call the eye from hour to hour; and on rainy days its grays are soft, enveloping mantles for the sight. Its peculiar trait is a greenish tint in the blue, pervasive but not defined, an infusion of clear emerald, translucent, such as one sees in winter sunsets in New England; but here in early summer you will distinguish it at high noon, after the rainless days of late spring. Tradition associates heat with this coast, as with the Mediterranean generally; but that is an illusion of the foreigner. Tunis is often chilly, bitterly cold at times, though without the fall of snow; it lies under the heights of the Atlas, and the winds bring down the snow-chill on their wings. I remember one February when there were no trains from Algiers for five days, the snow blocking the road; it lay, at some places on the line, nine feet deep. But whatever may be the weather, the atmospheric charm remains; it is soothing, and has narcotic quality.

A fine landscape in fine weather is always captivating and assimilates the traveller to the land. One is always at home in the sun; and a noble view finds a friend in every eye. One or two such experiences will make the fortune of a whole journey and after a while be its whole memory. But in some regions, some cities, the spell is perpetual; it is so at Tunis. The prospect is broad, and wherever one turns the eye wanders off delightfully. The most complete view is from the western hill, where is a beautiful great park of rolling land with woods whence you will see the white city southward; it lies like a great lily on its pads of green background, with its motionless blue waters round about—a lake-country scene; level waters like a flood, all floored and streaked with purple and blue bands and reaches—a water prairie—to where Carthage gleams white on its own green hill, amid an horizon of snowy villages dazzling in the sun; and between, nearer, isolated roofs that flash emerging from their obscure green gardens and tree-clumps, here and there; farther still to the southeast, as the eye travels out over the long lake into the gulf and the sea, rises a mass of mountain blues that bound the entrance to the land and its harbors. It is a view fit for a Greek amphitheatre.

Wherever you go, you are always coming out on these massive, spacious, beautifully colored prospects, white strips of city or village amid the spring, set in the master tone of blue that envelopes and combines them—sky, and lake, and sea, themselves infinitely changeable with the light and the distance and the hour. Even in the most unexpected places Heaven will open these far-off ways over a new land. I remember going into an obscure and blind street, in the Arab quarter, among buildings in all stages of apparent decay. I lifted the knocker at the lovely, nail-studded door of an ancient-looking house, and passed at once into an inner court with a fountain, beautifully decorated, cool, shadowy, exquisite in repose and the sense of luxury; and I was led on through a maze of stairways and passages till I came out on a large room below the roof with a balcony; and stepping forward, I saw unrolled as if by enchantment the whole sea-view. There must be many such commanding points of vantage in the houses on the crest of the thickly built hill—old Tunis, where the Arabs live. From this station I overlooked the lower city with all its roofs and streets. The multitude of green-tiled roofs on different levels made the color-ground, whence rose the numerous low, white domes, the slender minarets also touched with green or tipped with golden balls, the greater domes of the mosques, the mass of the citadel; broad French faubourgs and avenues were enclosing and defining lines, with irregular masses of foliage, and deep, narrow streets sank in the near scene, full of their native life. It was an architectural wilderness of form and color, arresting, vivifying, oriental in mass, feeling and detail, with the suggestion of a dream, of evanescence, and round it was poured on all sides the still blue element—sky, ocean, air. In Tunis, I noticed, everything seemed to end thus, in something beyond, in a mood; life constantly distilled its dream, and it was a dream of the senses.

The senses are constantly appealed to; they are kept awake, alert, attentive, and they are fed; they have their joys. We do not habitually use our senses for joy; and this is a part of the spell of Tunis, that there, under a Southern sky, the senses come into their own again. It is not merely the instinct of curiosity that is kept active by an ensemble so variously novel and insistent—for example, these pavilioned minarets, square with a cube above, ending in a green pyramid, or else octagonal in shape with the gallery and its awning, tipped by the three gold balls and crescent—haunting one like a strange sky; or the same instinct crudely excited by the ensemble of a population so foreign in physiognomy, garb, and physical behavior as the Arab in its multifarious aspects, its color and movement, all the unaccustomed surface of life. A street in old Tunis is truly seen only when there is no one in it; it is then that it is most impressive and yields up its spirit. What privacy! those blank walls! those rare high windows beautifully set! those discreet hanging balconies of latticed wood and iron! those nail-studded doors in exquisite patterns, that seem to have been rarely opened! An old house, set in some deep forest, is not more retired. And, if one passes within—silence, and soft footfalls, and refinement of all sense-impressions, the constant presence of delicately moulded handiwork, tiles cooling to the eye, wrought stucco, carved wood; and in those interiors, with their beautiful ceilings and wainscoting, are columns that seem of pagan purity, fountains as of woodland solitude, courts of garden peace. It is wonderful, how this effect of harborage and seclusion has been attained by an art so simple—flowers, water, plaster, wood, traceries, colored tiles. The city must be full of beautiful objects of this old art. It is not in this or that house only, nor in the public museums where rare examples are collected and massed, that one feels this artistic quality in the old race. It is felt in the handicrafts everywhere, the decoration of the surfaces, the enamelling, the gilding, the effort and liking for what is wrought in lovely patterns and relieved work of every description. There is a detail in the Tunisian sense of beauty, an omnipresent and conscious decorative spirit, something native and human. It is not only in the palace, but in the street, as one treads the narrow ways, and looks into the bright shops, and loiters in strange corners. It is an art of the senses—decoration is most obviously that. Rooted in barbaric taste? possibly; but most things human are rooted in barbarism. Unintellectual? perhaps, in the European sense. Unemotional? certainly not on the European scale of the emotions. Not developed from the beauty of the human form? of course. But there is a spirit of the senses as there is a spirit of the intellect; and it has its own art, a distillation of its life, as I intimated in speaking of the landscape that leads one into the mood of a dream—a dream of the senses. This art is akin to that landscape—it is of the life of the senses; and the Arabs were always frankly a sensual race. And, however it be, the city has an artistic temperament, to me; it has no factory qualities in its aspect, its wares, or its people; it is yet virgin of the future, a dying perfume of the past. This flavor that I find in its art is not Arabian, though it flowered from that desert root; it is Andalusian, and comes from the skill and temperament of those old exiles who were driven out from the southern shores of Spain in successive waves of the Moorish emigration, each in turn sowing broadcast seeds of the most exquisite Arab art all along the shores of North Africa, and richly here at Tunis. It was an hereditary art, in families of builders, wood-carvers, stone-cutters, stucco-moulders, painters, gilders, dyers, embroiderers, leather-workers, damaskeen-workers, illuminators—the Tunisian arts of daily life, that gave to life that brilliant and exquisite surface in dress, utensils, interiors, and also broad urban artistic effects of luxury in the look of its commerce, the display of its multicolored crafts, and the vistas of its minaret-haunted sky. Tunis, in fact, is not altogether native, not of the pure desert blood; from the thirteenth century well into the times of the Renaissance it had a flavor not unlike that of a Greek colony in Sicily or on old Italian coasts; it was grafted with the flower of Andalusian culture, transplanted in adversity and flourishing on the African soil—blooming, perishing, and leaving this exquisite memory of itself, this intuition of vanished refinement and elegance, like a perfume.

To this Andalusian infusion is also traced the charm of the manners of the Tunisians, that gentleness of breeding, softness, and urbanity, blended with an immovable dignity, which is so indescribable a racial trait. It is not the least foreign thing about them, and adds to the fond of mystery that they exude; for, notwithstanding all that can be seen or told, or gleaned from the past, mystery is of the essence of the traveller’s impression at his first contact with the Arab race. It is a silent landscape, a speechless folk, an incommunicable civilization; it is not only the closed mosque, the secluded house, the taciturn figures strange in garb and pose, immovably contemplative; but their life—all that they are—seems a closed book in an unknown tongue, a scroll unrolled but unintelligible. The feeling of racial mystery is intense, and all external impressions lead the traveller finally back to that—the insoluble soul of the race. It is not merely Islam. These shores from the dawn of knowledge have been one of the most fertile couches of the animal, man; here the young barbarian has been born and bred, and passed away, through all the centuries, and every civilization of the West has been seeded in conquest, and has flowered in cities, typical capitals, and withered away, leaving among the native race its ruins in their fields, in their blood, on their faces—like the Christian cross still tattooed on Kabyle foreheads. It is a race that assimilates but is not assimilated. It has taken the color and form, more or less impregnated with the spirit, of the genius of Carthage, Rome, Byzantium, Islam, France; it has felt the impact of Greek, Norman, Spaniard; but it was ever a race of inexhaustible resistant power, independent, tenacious, rebellious. It was never submerged or exterminated. It is a fine race. Tunis is one of its cosmopolitan cities, where it has drunk of every foreign stream and influence, has been civilized, softened, informed—a city of the various Mediterranean world, with great colonies of other folk in it, Italians, Jews, Maltese—a New York, as it were, on its own scale. In old Tunis, Arabized as it is, the desert race is itself only an infusion; yet so persistent is the ideal of race on its own soil, and so nomadic is the provincial population, that one feels the presence of that old racial soul, rightly or wrongly, into which the strength of the desert and the mountains has passed, which never breathed the breath of Europe, which remains in its own loneliness as in a fastness. It attracts and perplexes the human mind that would fain make acquaintance with it, but is oppressed by a feeling of impotence. And the exquisite personal demeanor of the Tunisians is enigmatic in its impression; it is like the charm of some Chinese painting or scroll that only emphasizes the unintelligibility, the incommunicability of the too variant spiritual past. With such delightful manners, such identical refinements of taste, it would be so easy to be friends! But no; it is more rational to think of it all as an artistic growth of a foreign culture, a part of the lovely Andalusian inheritance of the land.

To a mind with a historical background it is odd to find Tunis so completely a modern city. The Andalusian tradition is unconcentrated, and slight in its elements of reality, in things; its full experience is rather an imaginative memory; and of the times before that there is nothing left. In the suburban country there are more, though few, relics of past ages, but there the memory works more freely. One recalls, looking off to the sea-towering Mountain of the Two Horns, that on one of those peaks rose the ancient temple of Baal. The harbors of Carthage are fascinating to the eye of the imagination; but the specific remains there are scanty and mediocre; they arouse no reaction deeper than thought; and in the museum of Carthage one dwells most on the curious fact that what little has come down to us of that far-off life has found its way only by the grave itself; here, as in so many places, the tomb has been the chief conservator of life in its material aspects and what may be inferred from them of the soul of dead populations. It is rather in the neighborhood of the Cathedral that memory expands, for beside the near home of the White Brothers, who have spread their mantles and left their bones throughout the Sahara, a noble mission nobly done, here survives the only recorded anecdote of the history of this ridge, that must have been the place of innumerable tragedies—the marvellously vivid Christian story of Saint Louis’s death. The narrative is as fresh and poignant as if it were written yesterday; and on the spot one likes to remember that the chivalrous and good French crusader and king is a Moslem as well as a Christian saint. It is a symbol of peace and conciliation. The past, however, is here a barren field. Antiquity is felt, not in the survival of its monuments, but in the sense of the utter waste, the annihilation of the past, the extinction that has overtaken all that human life and its glory and struggle—Punic, Roman, Visigothic—the emptiness of the place of their battles, religions, pleasures, buildings, and tombs. It is all débris; it is of the slightest—little archæological heaps and pits in a vast horizon of silent sky and sea. The mind becomes merely pessimistic, surveying the scene; the mood of fatalism invades it—the mood of the frozen moon and the solar catastrophe—floods of the eternal nothingness—a mood of the pure intellect; and one is glad to come back to some nook like Ariana, a village midway between Carthage and Tunis, where ruin becomes again romantic and human. The very roses bloom there as in a deserted garden of long ago. It was there that the Hafsides, the rulers of the golden age of Tunis in the thirteenth century, had their country-seats—fair as the paradise at Roccada, where one “was gay without cause and smiled without a reason”—surrounded by gardens, with great lakes shadowed by pine and cypress, and gleaming with kiosks lined with marble and faience, with ceilings of sculptured wood gilded and painted, and cooled by the fresh waters of many fountains. The love of the country was always a trait here—an Arab trait—the rich like to get out of the city to some place of quiet, privacy and repose, such as La Marsa to-day by the sea near Carthage. The sense of the reposeful country mingles with that of the beautiful city in the past as well as now; and the Hafsides were great civilizers, builders, favorers of trade, patrons of the arts and of science. Their works and their gardens are gone alike. Time drives his ploughshare often and deep in an African city; and it is not alone on the green and shining levels of the suburban country, with its great spaces and imperial memories, where every maritime and migratory race has written some half-obliterated line of history, that the mountains look on the sea, and there is a great silence; but ruin is a near neighbor in the city as well. How many nooks and corners, full of the romance of places left to decay! That, too, is an Arab trait: to leave the old to decay and forgetfulness. It is natural that things should die, and be let lie where they fall. Oblivion is never far off.

What lassitude at last! Is it only the nerve-soothing weather, which cradles and lulls, week after week, the wearied Western mind? Is it only a renaissance of the senses, coming into their own, restored and vivified with strange forms and colors, accepting the impermanence of things human, and content to adorn and refine the sensual moment, to withdraw and enjoy? or is it a new world, a new mode of human life, with its own perceptions and intuitions and valuations, a new form of the protean existence of men on the earth, with another memory, psychology, experience? Whatever it be it is a spell that grows.

VII

I like to pass my afternoons in the shop of the perfumer in old Tunis. I come by covered ways, where the sunlight sifts through old rafters on stained walls and worn stones, and soon discern in the softened darkness the low, small columns wound with alternate stripes of red and green—bright clustered colors; down the winding way of dimmed light in the narrow street opens on either side the row of shallow shops, shadowy alcoves of bright merchandise; and there in the heart of old Tunis, each in his niche, canopied by his trade and seeming an emanation of the things he sells, sit the perfumers. A throng passes by, now dense, now thin—passes forever, in crowds, in groups, in solitude, rarely speaking; and over against the silent movement sit the merchants—tranquil figures in perfumed boxes—whose business seems one long repose. A languid scent loads the dusky air.

Just opposite the venerable Mosque of the Olive, an isle of sanctity still uncrossed by the heathen Frankish sea, right under the shadow of its silence-guarded doors, stands and has stood for centuries the shop where I love to lounge away hours that have no attribute of time. My host—I may well call him so, we are old acquaintances now—salutes me, his robe of fading hues detaching the figure from the background as he rises; his serene face lightens with a smile, his stately form softens with a gesture, he speaks a word, and I sit down on the narrow bench at the side, and light the cigarette he has proffered, while his only son quickly commands coffee. How well I remember years ago when the child’s soft Arab eyes first looked into mine! He is taller now, beautifully garbed in an embroidered burnoose; and he sits by me, and talks in low tones. What a relief it is, just to be here! What an ablution! The very air is courtesy. There is no need to talk; and we sit, we three, and smoke our cigarettes, and sip our coffee, with now and then a word, and regard the street.

A motley street, like the bridge at Stamboul—a provincial form of that unfathomable sea of human faces; and, here as there, an unknown world in miniature, diverse, novel, brilliant—the African world. The native predominates, with here and there a flash of foreign blood, round-faced Sicilians, Spaniards whose faces seem in arms, French in uniforms; but always the native—every strain of the littoral and the highland, every tint of the desert sun: black-bearded Moors of Morocco, vindictive visages; fat Jews of Djerba laughing; negroes—boys of Fezzan or black giants of the Soudan; Arabs of every skin, hints of Gothic and Vandal blood and the old blond race long before all, resolute Kabyles, fair Chaouia, Touaregs with white-wrapped faces, caravan men, Berber and Bedouin of all the land; women, too, veiled or with children at the open breast. That group of Tunisian dandies—how they stroll! olive faces, inexpressive, with the jonquil stuck over the ear, swinging little canes, clad in fine burnooses of pale blues or dying greens or ashy rose! Those bare-legged Bedouins, lean shoulders looped in earth-brown folds—how they walk! Every moment brings a new challenge to the eye. What life histories! what unspeaking faces! how closed a world! and my eyes rest on the shut gates of the ancient Mosque of the Olive over against me; I feel the spell of the unknown sealed in that faith, this life—the spell of a new life of the spirit of man, the mystery of a new earth-life of his body.

One falls into revery and absent-mindedness here, as elsewhere one falls asleep; but not for long. A lady, closely veiled, stands in the shop with her shorter, low-browed attendant. I hear low syllables softly murmured; I am aware of a drop of perfume rubbed like dew on the back of her hand just below the small fingers, not too slim; I watch the fall of the precious, twinkling liquid in the faceted bottle; I mark the delicate handling of the small balances. It is like a picture in a dream, so still, so vivid in the semi-darkness of the booth. She is gone, and the fancy wanders after her—whither? The boy’s taleb, his teacher of the mosque school, passing, sits down for a moment—an alert figure, scrutinizing, intelligent, energetic. There has been some school excitement, some public commotion; master and boy both scan the last paper with eagerness. I ask about the boy’s lessons; but with a kind look at my young friend, and a half reply to me, he puts the question aside, as if one should not say pleasant things in a boy’s hearing too much. He is soon off on his affairs; and other friends of the shop come and go, not too often, some hearty, some subtle, but all cordial, merchants who would woo me away to other shops behind whose seemingly narrow spaces lies the wealth of great houses—oh, not to buy, but only to view silken stuffs, trifles of wrought silver, things begemmed, inlaid sword and pictured leather, brass, mosaic, horn, marvels of the strong and deft brown Arab hand in immemorial industries; the wealth of a large world is nigh, when I please—it is but a step here to Samarcand or Timbuctoo; but I say, lightly, “Another day.”

I love better to sit here, flanked by the huge wax tapers, overhung by the five-fingered groups of colored candles, amid the curiously shaped glasses and mysterious boxes, the gold filagree, the facets, the ivory eggs—and to breathe, only to breathe, diffused hidden scents of the rose and the violet—jasmine, geranium—essences of all flowers, all gardens, all odorous things, till life itself might seem the perfumed essence of existence and the sensual world only an outer dusk. Oh, the delightful narcotism! I was ever too much the Occidental not to think even in my dream—I am conscious of the feeling through all—“What am I, an alien, here?” But it is sweet to be here, to have peace, and gentleness, and courtesy, young trust and brave respect, and breeding; it is balm. The darkness falls; the passer-by grows rare; it is closing time. There is a drop for my hand now, for good-by. The boy companions me to the limit of old Tunis. It is good night. It is a departure—as if some shore were left behind. It is a nostalgia—a shadowy perception that something more of life has escaped, of the irretrievable thing, gone, like something flown from the hand. And as I come under the Gate of France into the lights of the brilliant avenue, I find again him I had eluded, whom I heard as the voice of one standing without, saying: “What am I, an alien, here?”—I am again the old European.

VIII

Quick music comes down the evening street—the clatter of cavalry—the beautiful rhythm of horses’ backs—flash of French uniforms so harmonized with the African setting—spahis, tirailleurs, guns—a gallant and lively scene in the massed avenue! I love the French soldiers in Africa; but it is with a deeper feeling than mere martial exhilaration that one sees them to-night, for this is an annual fête-day, and their march commemorates the entry of the French troops into Tunis. One involuntarily looks at the faces of the natives in the crowds—impassible. But the old European cannot but feel a thrill at the sight of France, the leader of our civilization, again taking charge of the untamed and reluctant land and its intractable people to which every mastering empire of the North, from the dawn of our history, has brought in vain the force of its arms and the light of its intelligence. The hour has come again, and one feels the presence of the Napoleonic idea, clad, as of old, in the French arms; for it is from Napoleon, that star of enlightenment—Napoleon as he was in his Egyptian campaigns—that the French empire in Africa derives; and if, as the heir of the Crusades, France was through centuries the protector of Christians in the East, and that rôle is now done, it is a greater rôle that she inherits from Napoleon as the friend of Islam, with the centuries before her. Force, demonstrated in the army, is the basis of order in all civilized lands; that is why the presence of the French uniform delights me; but it is not by brute force that France moves in the essential conquest, nor is it military lust that her empire in Africa represents and embodies. It is, rather, a striking instance of fatality in human events that her advancing career in North Africa presents to the historical mind; a slight incident—a bey struck one of her ambassadors with a fan—forced on her the occupation of Algiers, and in the course of years she found herself saddled with a burden of colonial empire as awkwardly and reluctantly as was the case with us and the Philippines. There were anticolonialists in her experiences, as there were antiimperialists with us; and the arguments were about the same, essentially, in both cases—the rights of man, a new frontier, an alien people, with various economic considerations of revenue, tariff, exploitation. That obscure element of reality, however, which we call fate, worked on continuously, linking situation with event, difficulty with remedy, what was done with what had to be done, till the occupation spread from Algiers into the mountains, along the seaboard, over the Atlas, into the desert, absorbing the neighboring land of Tunis, skirting the dangerous frontier of Morocco—and now the vitalizing and beneficent power of French civilization, as it might almost seem against the will of its masters, dominates a vast tract of doubtful empire whose issues are among the most interesting contingencies of the future of humanity. It is a great work that has been accomplished, but is greater in the tasks it opens than in those already achieved.

The policy of pacification and penetration is, indeed, one of the present glories of France. There has been fierce fighting, hard toils of war; the land has been the training-school of French generals; and were it known and written, the story of French campaigning in the mountains and the desert would prove to be one of those heroic chapters of fine deeds obscurely done, rich in personal worth, that of all military glory have most moral greatness. The esprit of the soldiers was like that of devoted and lost bands—they were there to die. But it belongs to military force to be initial and preparatory, occasional, in its active expression; thereafter, in its passivity, it is a guarantee; it is order. The great line of French administrative policy, whether playing through the army or beyond it, was, nevertheless, the child and heir of Napoleon’s idea; amity with Islam. To respect rites, usages, prejudices, to make the leaders of the people—chiefs, judges, religious heads—intermediaries of power, to find with patience and consideration the line of least resistance for civilization by means of the social and racial organization instead of in opposition thereto, and to display therewith not a spirit of cold, proud, and superior tolerance but a frank and interested sympathy—that, at least, was the ideal of the French way of empire. It had its disinterested elements—respect for humanity was implicit in it. What strikes the close student of the movement most is not the military advance but the extraordinary degree to which the military advance itself was impregnated with intelligence, scientific observation, scholarly interest, economic suggestion, engineering ambition, as if these French officers were less men of arms than pioneers of knowledge and public works. The publications through fifty years by men in the service on every conceivable topic relating to the land and its people in scientific, economic, and historical matters are innumerable; they constitute a thorough study of vast areas. Such a fact tells its own story—a story of devotion in a cause of civilization.

Peaceful penetration does not mean merely that the railroad has entered the Sahara, and the wire gone far beyond into its heart, and the express messenger crossed the great waste; nor that the school and, with it, the language are everywhere, subduing and informing the mind; nor that agricultural science, engineering skill, economic initiative, and even philanthropic endeavor, hospitals, hygiene, are at work, or beginning, or in contemplation; but it means the restoration of a great and almost forsaken tract of the earth—from the Mediterranean and Lake Tchad to the Niger and the Atlantic—with its populations, to the benefits of peaceful culture, safe commerce, humane conditions, and to fraternity with the rest of mankind. It is not the brilliant military scene that holds my eye in the packed avenue, with its double rows of trees shadowy in the air, lined with brilliant shops and stately urban buildings, opera, cathedral, residence—the familiar modern metropolitan scene in the electric glare; but I see the work of France all over the darkened land from the thousand miles of seacoast, up over the impenetrable Atlas ranges, down endless desert routes—carrying civilizing power, like a radiating force, through a new world.

IX

Tunis is the gateway by which I entered this world—the new world of France, the old world of the desert. It was almost an accident of travel that I had come here, refuging myself from the life I had known, and seeking a place to forget and to repose, away from men. I had no thought of even temporary residence or exploration; but each day my interest deepened, my curiosity was enlivened, my sympathies warmed, and slowly I was aware that the land held me in its spell—a land of fantastic scenery, of a mysterious people, of a barbaric history and mise en scène, a land of the primitive. I coursed it from end to end.

The best description of North Africa as a visual fragment of the globe is that which delineates it as a vast triangular island, whose two northern horns lie, one off Spain at Gibraltar, the other, with a broader strait, off Sicily—with a southward wall overlooking the ocean-like Sahara, and running slantingly to the Atlantic, whose seaboard makes the narrow base of the triangle. This immense island is gridironed through its whole mass with mountains, ranging southwest and northeast, and hence not easily penetrable except at those remote ends; it is backed by table-lands of varying breadth between the Northern and the Saharan Atlas, which form its outer walls, and the conglomeration of successive ranges at varying altitudes, with their high plateaus, is cut with deep gullies, valleys, pockets, fastnesses of all sorts—a formidable country for defence and of difficult communication. Under the southern edge of the Saharan Atlas, like a long chain of infrequent islands, runs the line of oases in the near desert from the northeasterly tip of the lowlands of the isle of Djerba southwesterly the whole distance to the Atlantic, and here and there pressing deep into the waste of sand and rock; under the northern wall stretches the arable lowland here and there on the Mediterranean coast where lie the mountain-backed ports. At the highest points, in Morocco, lies perpetual snow, and the land is snow-roofed in winter.

Among these wild mountains in antiquity lived an indigenous blond race, whose blue-eyed, clear-complexioned descendants may still be met with there, and mixed with them a darker population from the sunburnt desert and lowlands, the Getulae and Numidians of history, of whom Jugurtha was a fine and unforgotten type; on these original and tenacious races, whose blood was inexpugnable, poured the immigrant human floods through the centuries from north and south, west and east, but the natives maintained their hold and the stock survived. The Punic immigration, with its great capital of Carthage, only touched the coast; the Romans established a great province in Tunisia, founded cities and garrisoned the country as far as the desert and into the Riff, and made punitive expeditions among the nomads to the south; the Visigoths flocked from Spain, overran the whole country, and passed away like sheets of foam; the Byzantines rebuilt the fortresses, and their hands fell away; the Arab hordes in successive waves carried Islam to the western ocean, and, settling, Arabized great tracts of the Berber blood, and made the land Moslem, but with a deeper impregnation than when it had been Romanized and Christianized; while through all the years of their slow and imperfect dominance new floods of fresh desert blood poured up from the Sahara, much as the barbarians fell from the north upon Rome. The massive island was thus always in the contention of the human seas, rising and falling; yet the Berber blood, the Berber spirit, continually recruited from the Sahara, seems never to have really given way; taking the changing colors of its invaders, it persisted—a rude, independent, democratic, fierce, much-enduring, untamable race. It wears its Islam in its own fashion. It keeps the other stocks, that dwell in it, apart; the Jews, the Turks, Italians, Maltese, Spaniards, are but colonies, however long upon the soil, and even though in some instances they adopt native costumes and ways. And now it is the turn of France—that is to say, of dominant Western civilization in its most humane and enlightened form.

How many interests were here combined! A land of natural wildness, of romantic and solemn scenes, of splendid solitudes and varying climates; a past dipped in all the colors of history; a race of physical competency, savage vitality, where the primitive ages still stamped an image of themselves in manners and actions and aspect; the fortunes of one of the great present causes of humanity, to be paralleled with Egypt and India, a work of civilization! It could not but prove a fine adventure. And so I turned nomad, and fared forth. Bedouin boys, rich with my last Tunisian copper, gave me delighted good-bys as they ran after my carriage, screaming bright-eyed; and I felt as if I had already friends in the lonely, silent land as the long level spans of the high aqueduct marched backward, and the train sped on.